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City lays on free taxis as buses reach end of line

Will Pavia

August 17 2016, 12:01am, The Times

In Centennial, the Lyft car service is to be used in an area once served by shuttle bus — a service that cost the city $20 a tripJeff Chiu/AP

The city of Centennial lies high in the Rocky Mountains and is linked to Denver by a light rail service. From today, residents in a district near the end of one of the railway lines can use a new kind of free public transport: a private car, ordered by smartphone, waiting at the station to take them home.

Like other cities all over America, Centennial has been wrestling with how to provide cheap public transport in its outlying suburbs. They are trying out a partnership with the taxi-hailing service Lyft. A similar experiment is under way in Florida, in the Tampa suburb of Pinellas Park, which has replaced two bus lines with a subsidised Uber service. Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, has a similar…